WAPdrive seeks independence
William Fellows
GMT Aug 14, 2000, 07:21 PM | ET Aug 14, 2000, 02:21 PM | PT Aug 14,
2000,
11:21 AM
New York - Personal homepage community FortuneCity wants to spin off
its WAPdrive unit and is looking for investment. WAPdrive is a 10-person
company that offers personal WAP services, including WML page hosting and
publishing, wireless address book and calendar services, plus the Gelon
Wapalizer smartphone emulator. Currently the company is trying to make
itself heard as just one among FortuneCity's 24 properties, but it
believes t can be more valuable as a separate entity.
WAPdrive claims 40,000 registered users and believes 81% of them have
actually created WML pages that are hosted on its site. It's
predominantly a consumer play, but the company wants to build out its B2B offerings. The
US, the UK, South Korea, Australia, Belgium, Brazil and Hong Kong top its
usage ist. About 25% of traffic to its site comes from North America,
although its biggest market is Europe.
WAPdrive currently offers a white box version of Wapalizer that can be
licensed to companies promoting wireless services. Automaker Audi uses
it. It can also be licensed free of charge for use by any site. The free
version comes with a banner ad promoting WAPdrive services.
WAPdrive has licensed Wapalizer to Vodafone and KPN Telecom, which are
using it to promote WAP services from their Web portals. It claims it will add
its most important partner to date this Wednesday. The unnamed operator will
begin using its services in a much broader fashion than any of
WAPdrive's current partners. It's also talking with a couple of potential partners
in the US, but like the rest of the WAP community is hamstrung until US
operators implement WAP gateways and begin delivering native WML
wireless data services, rather than HDML services.
In conjunction with WAP portal Cheekymonkey.com, WAPdrive is giving away
100,000 Nokia 7110 handsets to individuals who register with either
service. ts game plan is all about winning mindshare now, hoping to convert it
to market share down the road.
WAPdrive says it's not necessarily tied to WAP, should other standards
and protocols emerge to service 3G wireless network applications. It claims
it could reformat its service to accommodate other markup languages, but
believes the collective industry investment in WAP means the protocol
will endure.
